“How can we use our own embodied awareness and our perception of the client's bodymind to maximise our understanding of the intersubjective dynamics in the therapeutic process?”

This workshop is based on integrating the wisdom and expertise of two diverse and in many ways contradictory traditions: the psychoanalytic tradition and the body-oriented Reichian and post-Reichian tradition. Psychoanalysis has developed incredible sensitivity to unconscious mental processes and relational vicissitudes, but remains limited to the ‘talking cure’.

Body psychotherapy has developed a profound understanding of bodymind processes, and a rich and creative toolbox of working experientially bottom-up towards an integration of physical, emotional, imaginal and mental aspects of being, but remains limited by fixed relational stances on the part of the therapist and a lack of awareness around countertransference (where it is understood as the therapist’s problem only, rather than also containing information about the client’s unconscious).

By bringing the two traditions together, we get the best of both worlds, leading to profound possibilities of deepening the therapeutic process, making therapy more effective, and dealing with otherwise unmanageable impasses and complications.

Whereas recognising and working with the transference has been an essential aspect of the Reichian tradition, working in the transference and with the countertransference has been a neglected part of the therapeutic relationship in body-oriented work. Most humanistic therapists share with Freud the classical assumption that countertransference boils down to the therapist’s own ‘stuff’ or pathology, and is therefore best dealt with by further therapeutic work on one's own process and character as a therapist, towards authenticity or congruence.
As long as we reduce countertransference - in David Boadella’s terms – to an “interference with contact”, our work can not benefit from what the psychoanalytic tradition calls the ‘countertransference revolution’: the recognition that the transference and countertransference “interlock” (in Heinrich Racker’s terms) and that some of our experience in the therapeutic position can give us deep insight into the client’s inner world, including their early relational experiences which contributed to their character formation. This interlocking depends upon ‘somatic resonance’, but goes way beyond its traditional meaning as ‘feeling the client’s feelings’. The ‘countertransference revolution’ helps us recognise how the “client’s conflict becomes the therapist’s conflict”.
The fact that body-oriented tradition has overlooked and ignored the ‘countertransference revolution’ is curious, because it is precisely embodied perception should enable the therapist to be much more acutely aware of the ways in which the client's unconscious experience is communicated nonverbally, subliminally - via empathic attunement, somatic resonance, projective identification - and thus appears in the countertransference.
“Within the Body Psychotherapy tradition … the relational vicissitudes of the therapeutic endeavour are still under-theorised. Thus, a holistic and phenomenological two-person psychology as bodymind process still awaits formulation.”

Workshop format

Michael has been working on re-integrating the Reichian and psychoanalytic traditions since the 1980’s and is an internationally recognised trainer in this field.

In this workshop, we will use participants’ own personal-professional experience and client material to learn experientially and theoretically, using role-plays to work through supervision vignettes in an embodied and experiential way. Michael will interweave the group process with the learning as well as skills practice, to demonstrate and teach, drawing on our shared experience in the group.

Learning Objectives

to deepen and enhance our ‘implicit relational knowing’

to deepen our awareness of the relational significance of non-verbal communication

Upcoming Events

These small supervision groups run on a regular monthly basis at Fulcrum House in Bristol. There are three groups with 4 participants each during each Tuesday (11.20-13.20; 13.30-15.30; 15.45-17.45). From January 2018 there are 3 places available in the second group – please contact Michael for details. The cost is £55 for each 2-hour group. download[...]

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Testimonials

"I just thought I would write and say how much I enjoyed the weekend. I found the ideas refreshing and exciting. I have been very conscious in my work with clients this week in observing subtle changes and feel that my work has really benefited from the experience of the weekend. I feel a renewed interest in the way I approach the work."

Jan W

"...He works with such integrity and commitment and his energetic openness invites a level of trust and self-exploration that allowed me to experience and witness profound moments of change..."

Beatrice Millar

"...Michael combines his vast knowledge and wealth of experience to deliver a powerful and transformative workshop..."